Earth- Giants, Golems, & Gargoyles, page 26
I pulled the fire resistant shirt over my face to protect from the heat. Then I heard it, the staccato clicks of mechanisms triggering and gears whirring.
“Stay down, no matter what!” I yelled. The first blast sounded, followed by seven more: projectile weapons. I could hear retreat orders being called by the Guild and smugglers alike.
Then the room shifted, as two adjacent walls started to close in.
Rasikh was shuddering now, a growl rumbling in his chest. “The walls are closing!”
“I know,” I called back, remembering where I saw the change from tapestry to floor. “I need you to reach forward until you don’t feel the carpet anymore, then dig those fucked up claws in like our lives depend on it.”
He stretched his pained claws forward and shoved his hooks into the floor up to his scales.
I heard another grinding gear from beneath us. “The floor’s going to give way and take all that shit off your back. Hang on, now!” Digging my fingers between his scales, I clung on as the floor gaped open beneath us.
We swung down like a hinge, Rasikh’s claws still on the topside of the throne room. I could hear the splashing and hissing of the rubble that had been piled on us falling into some toxic trap below.
“Can you pull yourself up?” I scampered up his mandible to the right side of this gamble, bracing my boot against his straining claws like I could somehow keep him from falling. “C’mon, Rasikh, pull! Use your tail.”
The room was hotter than hell, old gears groaning as the walls closed in, knocking every memory from this room into the abyss below.
He heaved and scrabbled, digging his way up the wall. I stayed with him the whole time, sneaking peeks through my shirt to dart around the flames, staying in line with his nose for scent and, by the seas and skies, I remembered to keep talking.
Once he was out, I led the way with my hand on his snout, skirting the edges of the path. Everywhere with carpet had turned into the gaping maw that was eating the room, and the walls were pushing everything in to be consumed. Rasikh snaked along, following my lead while still shielding me from the flames, and I followed the map I made in my mind, hoping for accuracy. Any errors and we would plunge into the acid bath below.
I barely realized we’d made it out of the throne room, my skin still blistering with residual heat. Pulling my shirt off my face, I darted to the door, spinning my lock picks as Rasikh cleared the room. The two grand doors slid together, sealing the chamber and chaos inside. The last thing I saw before they closed was the skull of the Apex dragon, dragged backwards by the length of its spine, slipping over the edge into the darkness below.
And then it was just us again, alone with the sound of our panting breath. As my eyes adjusted, I found the faint sheen of Rasikh’s shape beside me, his snout questing for me. Wordless, I put my shaking hands out, sliding them over the smooth scales of his muzzle.
“Tiamat’s teeth,” Rasikh groaned, sniffing at my backpack. “All of that for nothing. No treasure, barely any lux . . .”
“Not nothing.” I ran my fingers over the places where the molten lux was cooling on him, filling in the gaps where his iron scales had rusted away, sealing the broken places with something tougher than dragonscale, hardier than iron. I realized I was grinning stupidly, a lump in my throat and my eyes hot. In the sunlight, my boy would sparkle like a dark jewel. And it was about time he got some sun. Razzle Dazzle indeed.
I peered closer, catching a faint glow reflected in the dark scales, a vertical row of runes sliding from green to blue to purple. And above them, my own startled eyes. I brushed my fingertips over the line of my markings, now alight, my heart pounding.
“Not nothing by half,” I said, with a shaky laugh. “So . . . how the hell are we getting home?”
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Biographies
Rhonda Parrish
Editor
Rhonda Parrish is the editor of many anthologies including, most recently, Fire: Demons, Dragons, & Djinns; Grimm, Grit and Gasoline; and F is for Fairy.
In addition, Rhonda is a writer whose work has been in publications such as Tesseracts 17: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast and Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (2012 & 2015). Her collection of true Edmonton ghost stories, Eerie Edmonton, and her YA paranormal thriller, Hollow, are forthcoming in 2020.
Her website, updated regularly, is at www.rhondaparrish.com
Jane Yolen
Grin of Stone: A Political Rant
Jane Yolen is the author of over 376 books in almost every genre. She is a Grandmaster of SFWA (Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America, SFPA (Science Fiction Poetry Assn), and World Fantasy Assn. Her books and stories and poetry have won 2 Nebulas, 3 World Fantasy Awards, 3 Golden Kite Awards, two Massachusetts Book Awards, The Boskone Skylark Award, and dozens of others. Six colleges and universities have given her Honorary Doctorates for her body of work. She was the first writer to win the New England Public Radio’s Arts & Humanities Award and the first woman to give the Andrew Lang lecture in St Andrews University in Scotland, a series that has gone on since 1923. One of the awards set her good coat on fire.
Chadwick Ginther
The Enforcer
Chadwick Ginther is the Prix Aurora Award-nominated author of the Thunder Road Trilogy (Ravenstone Books) and Graveyard Mind (ChiZine Publications). His short fiction has appeared recently in Fire: Demons, Dragons, & Djinns, Over the Rainbow: Folk and Fairy Tales from the Margins, and Abyss & Apex. He lives and writes in Winnipeg, Canada, spinning sagas set in the wild spaces of Canada’s western wilderness where surely monsters must exist.
Kevin Cockle
Wings of Stone
Kevin Cockle is a speculative-fiction author with over thirty short stories appearing in a variety of anthologies and magazines. His novel Spawning Ground is narrowly believed to have invented the micro-genre of “occult game theory”, and was published by Tyche Books in 2016. In 2019, Kevin, alongside co-writer Mike Peterson, won AMPIA’s “Rosie” award for the feature-film screenplay Knuckleball, breaking a persistent streak of long-list nominations, honourable mention citations, and other close-but-no-cigar metrics.
Damascus Mincemeyer
Soil, Native and Otherwise
Exposed to the weird worlds of horror, science fiction, and comic books as a boy, Damascus Mincemeyer has been ruined ever since. He’s now a writer and artist of various strangeness and has had stories published (or soon-to-be published) in the anthologies Fire: Demons, Dragons, & Djinn (Tyche Books), Bikers Vs The Undead, Psycho Holiday, Monsters Vs Nazis (Deadman’s Tome publishing, books for which he also provided cover art), Hell’s Empire (Ulthar Press), Crash Code (Blood Bound Books), the Sirens Call ezine, and the magazines Gallows Hill and StoryHack. He lives near St. Louis, Missouri, USA, and can usually be found lurking about on Twitter @DamascusUndead.
Laura VanArendonk Baugh
Land Girl
Laura VanArendonk Baugh loves writing fantasy of many flavours, as well as other genres and non-fiction. She began this story after spending a day on East Falkland photographing penguins and recalling similar landscapes in Ireland and Northern Ireland, with rather fewer penguins. She lives in Indiana and enjoys Dobermans, travel, chocolate, and making her imaginary friends fight one another for imaginary reasons. Find her award-winning epic fantasy and other work at www.LauraVAB.com.
Catherine MacLeod
The Stone Alphabet
Nova Scotia writer Catherine MacLeod loves ginger tea, television soundtracks, and overheard conversations. Her publications include short fiction in Nightmare, Black Static, On Spec, Tor.com, and several anthologies, including Fearful Symmetries, Playground of Lost Toys, and Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond. Her story Hide and Seek won the inaugural Sunburst Award for Short Story.
Mara Malins
Winner Takes All
Mara Malins battles spreadsheets by day and fiction by night. She lives in Manchester, England, with her menagerie of three cats, two turtles, a social media loving partner, and a disobedient garden. If you want to know when her next fiction is released, or see thousands of pictures of her cats, find her on Twitter at @maramalins, Goodreads on Mara_Malins, or check out her website at www.maramalins.com
Steve Toase
Kiln Fired
Steve Toase was born in North Yorkshire, England, and now lives in Munich, Germany.
He writes regularly for Fortean Times and Folklore Thursday.
His fiction has appeared in Shimmer, Lackington’s, Aurealis, Not One Of Us, Cabinet des Feés, and Pantheon Magazine amongst others. In 2014 Call Out (first published in Innsmouth Magazine) was reprinted in The Best Horror Of The Year 6, and two of his stories have just been selected for The Best Horror of the Year 11.
He also likes old motorbikes and vintage cocktails.
You can keep up to date with his work via his Patreon www.patreon.com/stevetoase, www.tinyletter.com/stevetoase, facebook.com/stevetoase1, www.stevetoase.wordpress.com and @stevetoase
Suzanne J. Willis
Goblin Harvest
Suzanne is a Melbourne, Australia-based writer, a graduate of Clarion South, and an Aurealis Awards finalist. Her stories have appeared in anthologies by PS Publishing, Prime Books, and Falstaff Books, and in Metaphorosis, Mythic Delirium, and Lackington’s, among others. Suzanne’s tales are inspired by fairytales, ghost stories, and all things strange, and she can be found online at suzannejwillis.webs.com
Blake Jessop
The Poacher and the Priestess
Blake Jessop is a Canadian author of science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories with a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Adelaide. You can read more of his speculative fiction in Rhonda Parrish's first elemental anthology, Fire: Demons, Dragons, & Djinns, and DefCon One’s I Didn’t Break the Lamp: Historical Accounts of Imaginary Acquaintances. He tweets @everydayjisei.
Buzz Dixon
Mike’s Massive Penis
A long-time writer in TV, films, graphic novels, comic books, video games, short stories, and novels for the YA market, Buzz Dixon’s credits include such animation classics as Thundarr The Barbarian, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Jem, Batman, and Tiny Toons; the films Dark Planet and G.I. Joe: The Movie; creating the Christian manga category with his hit Serenity graphic novel series; work for Disney and Marvel Comics, the Terminator 3 video game among others; and short fiction published in Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, National Lampoon, The Pan Book Of Horror Stories, Analog, and other publications. His new YA adventure novel, Poor Banished Children Of Eve, will be published shortly. A husband, father, grandfather, and litter box cleaner for a cranky old cat he inherited, Dixon can be found on his blog www.BuzzDixon.com, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
David L. Craddock
Where Green Things Grew
David L. Craddock lives with his wife and business partner in Ohio. He is the author of Stay Awhile and Listen, a three-part series that chronicles the history of World of WarCraft developer Blizzard Entertainment and Diablo/Diablo II developer Blizzard North; and The Gairden Chronicles, a young adult fantasy series published by Tyche Books. You can find him online at davidlcraddock.com, facebook.com/davidlcraddock, and @davidlcraddock on Twitter.
Rose Strickman
Troll Seal
Rose Strickman is a sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writer living in Seattle, Washington. Her work has appeared in anthologies such as Sword and Sorceress 32, That Hoodoo, Voodoo That You Do, and UnCommon Evil, as well as online zines such as Aurora Wolf and Luna Station Quarterly.
Gregory L. Norris
The Giants
Gregory L. Norris is a full-time professional writer, with work appearing in numerous fiction anthologies, national magazines, novels, and the occasional TV episode (and, so far, one produced feature film—Brutal Colors, which appeared on Amazon Prime in 2016). He once worked as a screenwriter on two episodes of Paramount’s Star Trek: Voyager series and is a former writer for Sci Fi, the official magazine of the Sci Fi Channel (before all those ridiculous Ys invaded). Three times now, he’s garnered mentions in Ellen Datlow’s Best Of The Year books, and two of his paranormal romance novels were published by Home Shopping Network for their “Escape With Love” line, the first time HSN has offered original novels to their global customers. He won Honourable Mention in 2016’s The Roswell Award in short SF fiction, and last year saw the publication of Into Infinity: The Day After Tomorrow, which he was hired by Anderson Entertainment in the UK to pen based upon the classic Gerry Anderson TV movie (and which he watched when he was eleven). Next month, his original sequel, Into Infinity: Planetfall, releases with a third novel planned for the franchise in 2019. Follow his literary adventures at: www.gregorylnorris.blogspot.com .
Tamsin Showbrook
A Golem’s Progress
Tamsin Macdonald lives in Stockport, England. As well as being an English tutor, she’s mum to two boys who will soon be taller than her (not difficult). Her stories are mostly speculative in nature, because they just turn out that way, and she’s had quite a few of them published and shortlisted in competitions.
Sarah Van Goethem
Maggie of the Moss
Sarah Van Goethem is a Canadian author who resides in southwestern Ontario. She spent lazy childhood summers on the farm, reading on the old tire swing beneath the maple tree, believing in fairytales.
Her first YA novel was in PitchWars and her second novel was longlisted for the Bath Children’s Novel Award. She’s also won various awards for her short stories, and her most recent, “Accidents Are Not Possible” will be in the Grimm, Grit and Gasoline Anthology published by World Weaver Press.
Sarah is a nature lover, a wanderer of dark forests, and a gatherer of vintage. You can find her at auctions, thrift stores, and trespassing at abandoned houses, all of which she tweets about @Sairdysue
Sarah is represented by Dorian Maffei of Kimberley Cameron & Associates Literary Agency.
Tim Ford
Children of the Colossus
Tim Ford is a Calgary-born writer and journalist of mixed race heritage. He has had bylines in publications including Beatroute Magazine and Livewire Calgary, and has written plays for stage and radio, including the first live radio play performed in 80 years in Calgary, Dead Air. His fiction has appeared in publications including Neo-Opsis Magazine and Crossed Genres, and his story “The Fivefold Proverbs of Tseng Xiaquan” was included in the Aurora Award-nominated anthology Shanghai Steam. Tim is accompanied at most times by his perfect fur baby, Bailey, the legendary corgi-pitbull cross. Follow him (and Bailey) online at www.thecanerdian.ca
V.F. LeSann
Earthbound
V.F. LeSann is the co-writing team of Leslie Van Zwol and Megan Fennell, united for greater power like Captain Planet, and sworn to tread the wobbly line between grit and whimsy. Having already launched mermaids into outer space and sent a demon to the glaciers of Iceland, “Earthbound” might solidify their reputation as the worst possible travel agents a cryptid could hire.
Other Tyche titles you may enjoy!
Discover the power of Fire and the creatures that thrive on it in these twenty-one stories.
Discover the power of Fire and the creatures that thrive on it in these twenty-one stories
Table of Contents
Title Page
Introduction
Grin of Stone:
A Political Rant
The Enforcer
Wings of Stone
Soil, Native and Otherwise
Land Girl
The Stone Alphabet
Winner Takes All
Kiln Fired
Goblin Harvest
The Poacher and the Priestess
Mike’s Massive Penis
Where Green Things Grew
Troll Seal
The Giants
A Golem’s Progress
Maggie of the Moss
Children of the Colossus
Earthbound
Biographies
Rhonda Parrish, Earth- Giants, Golems, & Gargoyles
